A Shield Against Sorrow
by Neriad13
Summary: Aegis, freshly unfrozen, has settled into her new life rather nicely. She has a purpose, a routine, a sense of security in her quiet corner of the map. No longer does she have to worry about passing as someone other than herself in order to follow pervasive social mores. But surviving a post-apocalypse is not easy. The needs of her body are always driving her further into danger...
1. Chapter 1: Smoke Signals

Lucy was the one who first saw the smoke rising from Sanctuary. It was early in the morning as she stumbled blearily out the door, meaning to milk Clarabell and use it to make a good portion of razorgrain porridge for breakfast. Her bucket was not where she had left it. Quietly grumbling to herself, she circled around to the other side of the house, in the hopes that her mother had forgotten it by the pump again.

And there it was, clear as day. A thin, gray line against the blue sky. A campfire in Sanctuary.

Someone was over there.

She told her parents about it over breakfast, her voice low and calm, in a desperate bid to keep them as much as herself from panicking. After all, the odds were that it was nothing. It was not entirely unheard of for scavengers, vagrants and merchants to pass through the old suburb every now and again. A leaking roof and a wall full of holes is still shelter enough for a weary body when you've been on the road for weeks.

 _Then again…_ the thought hung, unspoken, ominous, a silent black cloud drifting over the breakfast table. Odds were not something that had ever been in the favor of the Abernathy family.

Blake took the news in stride, all things considered. His spoon barely paused in its route to his mouth as he hurriedly reassured the family that he'd keep a close eye on their new neighbor, that there was most likely nothing to worry about, but that he would feel quite a bit better if he could have a look at everyone's weapons sometime today. Lucy took her gun out of its makeshift holster right then and there and passed it over the table to her father. Her mother followed suit, those old lines of worry crinkling her forehead once again.

Around noon, Blake took a break from his fieldwork and sat out in back at the pile of crates they'd turned into a workbench, taking each gun apart and meticulously cleaning each piece one by one, with a thin twig wound round with cotton. While he was unaware, Lucy snuck away from her chores to peer around the corner and with a start, saw how badly his hands were shaking as he worked. How tight his jaw was. How sad, his eyes.

She saw Mary falling to the ground again and again in her mind's eye, her father charging like a madman at the raider who had done it, clawing at every inch of that monster's exposed flesh, gouging his eye with a red-handled screwdriver. At that, the rest of them had fled.

And Mary was buried at the edge of the fields.

The haunted suburb over the hill had always been something of a mixed blessing to the Abernathy family. When they needed new fence posts or a hunk of corrugated metal, it was a damn sight easier than any other option to pop over there and pry what they sought from the packed earth and the sides of the old family homes.

Lucy's father had taken her on many such adventures when she was a young girl. She could still remember the first time she'd departed the boundaries of the farm - she must have been seven or eight, perhaps a little younger. Her pa had saddled up the old brahmin, stowed a collection of tools in the saddlebags and hefted her on top. She'd waved goodbye to her sister and mother as they vanished around the bend, farther away already than they had ever been in her entire life thus far.

She could still see her father's hand - the skin softer than it was now, the bony knuckles not quite so pronounced - resting on his gun, tensed to draw it at the first sign of trouble. She hadn't understood then. Were they going to kill rabbits? Her younger self had been quite certain that they were not. "Scah-ven-ging," her father had plainly said that morning over cold porridge left over from the day before. "I'm taking Lucy scah-ven-ging today. If it's all well and good with you, Connie?"

It was all very confusing to a child who had never seen a ghoul and knew nothing but fairy tales about Super Mutants.

She was not sure what she was expecting to see. Another farm, but broken down? That was the sanest image her imagination could conjure. Or would it be all blood and spikes, like the stronghold of the Master, the Evil Super Mutant Prince who had held an entire kingdom under his great green foot until a hero had come and put him in his place?

Thoughts of fairy tales did not leave her mind as they toddled on, passing by the oddest-shaped building she had yet seen. Her father had told her that it was one of the last remnants of a mystic order which once had the power to command inanimate pieces of metal into life. She giggled at first and then sternly told him that she was far too old to believe such things any longer. "Oh!" her father had gasped, his eyes widening with mock sorrow, "Does that mean that you're too old to be my princess too?"

She was thoroughly considering the question when they turned around the bend and found themselves peering over the edge into another world. Every thought was dashed from Lucy's mind in an instant. Crossing the rickety old bridge, its timbers groaning in seemingly agonizing pain beneath the weight of the brahmin, was like entering a long-abandoned fairy kingdom. The houses all seemed so strange, alien, as they looked back at them through empty windows and crooked holes, like gaps where teeth once were in a deranged grin. She felt dizzy as she looked around, her imagination working overtime. It was like nothing she'd ever seen before, nothing she'd ever imagined existing. Where was the windmill, the feeding troughs, the water pump? Who lived here like that?

Grinning from ear to ear, her father had handed her a claw hammer and a plastic cup and the corners of his eyes crinkling in merriment, told her to gather all the nails she could find. Just before she ran off, he grabbed her by the back of the collar and reeled her in. "There's a robot that lives in these parts." he said solemnly, all seriousness, "He takes care of his old family's house. I'm not sure if he'll be here today, but if you see him, be polite and you'll be just fine." Lucy nodded sagely, trying hard to contain her brimming excitement. It felt like joy was bursting out of every pore of her skin. A real-life guardian of a haunted village! A doomed knight, fated to serve his dead lord! It was far too much. She barely registered the fact that her father had pulled a crowbar from the pack and was setting about the markedly less-glamorous job of prying loose a section of crumbling wall.

She strolled along, the hammer heavy in her hand, the cup all but forgotten as she peeked through windows and ducked under doors, populating the empty rooms with visions of warm families and glowing lights. There was something so beautifully tragic about the rusty shells, the gaping emptiness of a space left behind.

It was so different from her little farm, way out in the middle of nowhere, visited by no one but the occasional traveling merchant or passing scavenger. So many people, all of them living in one place. _How many could fit in one house?_ she mused, _A family of ten, at least._ The numerous fenced-in yards must have been where they grew their food, though they seemed hardly big enough for the job and many of them were littered with old chairs and furniture.

Every once in a while she stumbled upon a tiny house, a smaller version of the big ones just large enough for her to crawl into on her hands and knees. Naturally, she assumed that this was where the children must have lived until they were tall enough to get into the big houses. She came away from the experience rather more glad that such barbaric practices were no longer part of parenting today.

She did not gather much in the way of nails that day.

It wasn't entirely her fault. Most of the good stuff had already been looted long before the Abernathy family were even a speck on the horizon. It must have been an exceedingly attractive place after the war - all those stocked pantries, the wiring in the walls, the medicine cabinets ripe for the picking. And of course, the easy building materials. She wouldn't have been the least bit surprised if every raider within twenty miles had some part of Sanctuary built into the walls of their hideaways.

Every once in a while, as the years passed and she became more adept at stripping what she needed from the blasted land, a spare chem or a can of food ten times as old as her might turn up. She gained a knack for wrenching rusty nails from the walls that anyone else would write off as hopeless causes and digging out lip-smacking mutfruits from the tangle of vines that consumed the backyards of many of the houses. But on the whole, it was a place that served very little use but for scrap. Scavengers tended to avoid it and raiders passed it up for more lucrative targets. No, that was not the reason why her father looked to the north with fear, his fingers tapping on his gun as the column of gray smoke made its appearance once again.

The danger was its very location.

It was far too good of a setup - an island surrounded on all sides by irradiated water, accessible only by a single choke point. All it would take was one savvy raider to tip the scale in a direction no one wanted to go. Extortion, gunpoint bargaining, savage beasts set on the non-compliant for sport. They'd heard too many similar stories from other farms, too many tragedies of burgeoning industry set upon by thieving hands and greedy hearts.

Blake Abernathy had considered taking out the bridge more than once. A load of well-placed explosives would solve that problem fast enough. It was ancient and sturdy, its foundations rooted in the river like a petrified tree, but given a stern push, there was little doubt that it would go sooner or later.

They just hadn't gotten around to doing it. Sanctuary was too rich in building materials, there was always other work to do, explosives cost more caps than anyone was willing to part with right now and when was any of that ever going to be a problem anyway?

And so it remained, the wind whistling through its quiet rooms, the accumulated trash of centuries blowing across its cracked sidewalks, the swings of its silent playground creaking ominously when stirred. It slumbered there, in its crumbling glory, all but waiting for someone to cross the chasm and claim it.

The thefts started a week later.

At first it was small things - a tato plant stripped of fruit, a wrench gone missing, the old welding mask most certainly not where it was supposed to have been. Not much of value was ever taken and the thief did not appear to be a particularly daring one. Their savings remained locked away safely inside, their food stores untouched, their makeshift arsenal left alone.

But the violation of privacy was more than enough to put Blake Abernathy on permanent edge. His hand constantly drifted over his pistol as he worked. Movement in the bushes startled him every single time. After dinner he would sit out on the veranda, rifle in hand and wait, watching for hours until he was too tired to keep his eyes open.

Connie was just as distraught. She gained a tenseness and a hardness that Lucy had not seen in her since the day of her sister's death and had very much been hoping she would never see again. She was frustrated by the smallest things, angry at everyone, crushingly sorrowful when she thought no one was watching. Every time she yelled at Lucy for some minuscule infraction, she'd almost immediately take it back, apologizing repeatedly, constantly, to the point of agonizing distraction, by tearfully confessing how much she loves her.

Lucy went about her chores as though nothing was wrong, telling herself that lie again and again until she half-believed it herself, until it was nearly, but not entirely, concrete fact. But her anxiety was like a constant whine in the background, a machine turning in the distance, its purpose obscure and the location of its controls long lost to time.

She slept with her gun on her pillow and glanced up for smoke signals in the sky more often than she cared to admit.

Nearly a month after the thefts had started, Blake Abernathy was dozing on the veranda, rifle on his knee, the thought of going to bed for the night getting more attractive by the minute. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes for perhaps the tenth time that night and was about to leave his post - when he saw it.

A shadowy figure, crawling on hands and knees, creeping around the edge of the melon patch, its hands closing around a particularly juicy specimen.

Lucy had heard a shout and the sound of two shots fired in quick succession. She met her mother's wide eyes and wild hair at the door and together, the two of them pushed through.

Blake was strolling through the fields, the rifle dangling lackadaisically from his fingers, his other hand clenched into a fist at his side.

Connie fussed and worried as he walked through the door, his face stern and impassive. He sat heavily at the dinner table, the old chair creaking and groaning beneath his solid weight. Without being asked, Connie poured him a shot of whiskey and passed it across the table.

He laid the gun down gently beside him, downed the shot in one go and confessed that he was not certain if he had wounded their visitor, though he had meant only to fire warning shots. Connie patted his hand reassuringly, saying that it would all look better in the morning. Lucy felt sick to her stomach. She eyed the whiskey, weighing the pros and cons of a shot for herself and thought better of it.

After a restless night and a dreary morning, when she'd dragged herself out of bed to tend to Clarabelle, she stumbled across a scrap of brilliant blue fabric caught on a fence post. She gazed at it, blinking confusedly, for a moment wondering how a physical piece of sky had come to rest on their farm. It blew in the wind, jewel-like and strange, smooth to the touch, its threads barely noticeable, as unlike her mother's rough homespun as it could possibly be.

Her parents assumed it to be part of the uniform of a new raider outfit. There were strange ones out there, ones who covered themselves in body paint and gleaming jewelry and brightly colored furs and howled at the moon. And it was not entirely beyond the pale to stumble upon a cache of finely preserved fabric from the old world, despite how otherworldly it all seemed to Lucy.

They swept through the woods together after breakfast but, rather thankfully, found no blood or sign of a struggle.

The thefts ceased entirely after that.

Lucy checked for the smoke rising from Sanctuary out of the corner of her eye every morning, a small ritual to ease her conscience. There were many days when it did not come at all, when she feared that the stranger over the hill was sick or injured or dying alone in a miserable shack. But then a week would pass and once again, she'd see the sign that there was life over the hill. It made her glad in a way she couldn't explain, having someone, anyone else living close by, watching for the smoke from their campfire.

As time went on, her father calmed down and stopped cleaning the guns every single day. Her mother's tenseness evaporated in starts and stops until one day she was humming as she worked once again.

It was late enough for the brightest stars of the night to wink into existence in the deepening darkness of the sky when Lucy kicked the door open, her arms fully laden with a bucket of rapidly browning carrot peels. They would make almost as good an addition to the compost heap as Clarabelle's cowpats. The peelings that they hadn't fried and made into carrot fritters for dinner, that is.

The three of them had spent an excruciatingly long day armed with knives and scrap buckets, peeling and chopping the leftover bounty of their harvest for pickling. Tomorrow they'd finish up most of the canning. Tonight the floor was covered with trough after trough of marinating vegetables and it stunk of vinegar to the rafters. The results of the process were never quite as good as Lucy had hoped they would be - everything lost its flavor in due time and by the end of the winter every beautiful color of nature was reduced to a lifeless, tasteless gray. But it kept them healthy in the lean months and that was all that mattered.

Lost in her thoughts of how she'd entertain herself come winter, she dumped the peelings on to the pile, thumping the bottom of the bucket loudly to get them all out. She imagined that she'd make another attempt at reading a book. Neither of her parents were terribly literate and she was not far ahead of them in her studies. The last time she'd gone to Diamond City, she'd sat in the back of the one-room schoolhouse and taken in all she could from the single lesson she was permitted. The teacher and his robot had given her some of their lesson plans and a load of verbal encouragement after it was over. Every so often during the summer, when she had a moment before bed, she'd take that lesson plan out and trace the letters with her finger, one by one. There were a few more words that she could identify now - dog, cat, rake, melon. It wasn't quite enough to make sense of a sentence yet, but she was getting there. Writing words in the dirt with a stick was like performing magic in front of her parents and their reaction never ceased to entertain her.

She turned away, her head abuzz with plans and thoughts of bed when she suddenly found herself staring down an expressionless face. The bucket slipped from her fingers, falling to the soft dirt with the quietest of _whumphs_. She could hear her heart pounding inside her ears, her blood rushing through her veins.

It took her a moment to realize that the face was not a face, but a mask. A welding mask, its eyes a single slit of bulletproof glass, regarding her coolly. She noted the dent in the chin where she'd most definitely dropped it as a child playing pretend and her eyes narrowed. The figure wearing it crept forward. Involuntarily, her heart racing in her chest so fast she thought it fit to burst, Lucy lurched backwards.

The figure drew a silvery pistol from the depths of its hide jacket and held it, their hands shaking, the sound of a button rapidly clicking on and off audible from where she was.

Fear coursing through her veins, her hand shot to her side and scrabbled at empty air. _My pipe pistol…_ she thought dizzily, seeing its exact location in her mind's eye. _Sitting on the makeshift workbench, half a broken screw hopelessly stuck in the receiver..._

 _How fast could they get here if I screamed?_ she thought, the sour taste of fear rising in her mouth, _Not faster than a bullet, surely._

The intruder was advancing.

The gun was in the figure's left hand now, glinting coldly in the moonlight, pointing only at the earth. She could see more clearly as the stranger approached, that they were swathed in a cape of shoddy hides sewn together with comical amounts of twine, the copious holes patched with bits of silvery duct tape. Lucy could hear them breathing heavily as they got closer, wheezing with every step, dragging their right leg piteously behind them as they limped into the open. She saw a dark blotch on the calf of their leather leggings and a trail of dark liquid snaking down the leg to vanish into the confines of a profusely duct-taped boot.

With a shuddering jolt, the intruder stopped, perhaps a mere foot and half away from her and slowly raised their right hand to the level of their chest. She saw a flash of brilliant blue fabric as the hide cape parted to reveal some sort of tight-fitting suit beneath, stained, worn and patched like the rest of the stranger's getup. Lucy smelled the too-familiar tang of iron in the air and noted the dried rust on the stranger's shaking hand. Her heart skipped a beat and then slowed, just for a fraction of a second.

"Do you…" she whispered, her voice coming out in an embarrassingly high-pitched squeak, "…need help? W-We have medicine. I-It's yours if you…"

The only answer she received was the impassible glint of the moonlight on the glass of the faceless welding mask. The stranger was fumbling with a pouch on their chest, trying again and again to undo a tiny bone clasp that they just couldn't seem to get their quivering fingers around. Slowly, her pity outweighing her fear at this point, Lucy reached out a hand to help them, just barely brushing the back of the stranger's hand. The visitor flinched as though Lucy had struck them across the face, sinking into the cape as though it were a protective blanket that a child might hide from monsters under.

"I'm sorry!" Lucy gasped, "I…I didn't mean…"

She heard a deep intake of air from beneath the mask and then the cape was pulled open to more easily reveal the pouch. It was attached to a crude bandolier slung across the figure's chest, its stitches awkward and ungainly. The tip of her tongue between her teeth, her own hands shaking now, she carefully took hold of the tiny bit of bone and threaded it through the loop of twine that served as a catch.

With a grunt of satisfaction, the stranger batted her hand away and slid two fingers into the tiny opening. When they were withdrawn, there was a long, delicate, chain tangled about them. _Jewelry?_ It certainly didn't have any other practical use.

For a split second, the thought of tackling the intruder to the ground _right now!_ flashed across her mind. Knocking the gun from their hand while they were distracted, racing for shelter, screaming at the top of her lungs while there was still a chance…

The thought evaporated as quickly as morning dew. With one last tug, the chain was free of its confines and the object on the end of it catching the light of the stars. It was a locket, the clasp broken, its tiny hinges held together with far more wishes than actual screws. It spun slowly in the night air as the stranger gradually reached out, their hand unsteady. Realizing what was happening far later than she should have, she hastily held out her hand and the stranger rested it gently in her waiting palm.

Hardly believing what it was she was looking at, she squinted at the picture inside in the dim light of the stars and glimpsed a tiny version of her own face looking back at her. She was smiling broadly in the way that children, but never adults in this world tend to do, the gap in her front teeth proudly displayed, a shredding tato sack dress gracing her skinny shoulders. A moment before her vision was blurred by tears, she saw Mary standing beside her in the picture, flexing her muscles, a grim look of mock-determination on her face.

She started to cry in earnest, her sturdy shoulders heaving with sobs in front of the shadowy stranger. Mary's locket! To see it again, to hold the one picture of her sister that had ever existed, taken by the one working camera any of them had ever seen. It was -

"He-ey…" she said softly to the visitor, hurriedly breaking out of her reverie, "I've got a stimpack inside if you…"

The stranger was gone as though they had never existed. Only the still trees cast their shadows on the tall grass.

Soon after that, the Abernathy family and the lone resident of Sanctuary adopted something of an unspoken truce. If a bushel of tatoes went missing in the night, that was not the end of the world. In all likelihood, it'd be replaced by a brace of fresh radroaches within the week. Other presents sometimes appeared on the doorstep as well - boxes of scavenged screws, nails, a pair of shoes exactly Connie's size at the exact moment when it could be declared that her old pair had given up the ghost.

Once or twice a year, Blake Abernathy filled up a basket with anything that could be spared and left it at the barricade by the old bridge. Lucy made sure there was always some sort of medicine packed and a proper needle and thread. They never saw anyone come out to pick it up, but by the next day it was always gone. That was thanks enough for them.

In the early days, they had tried to contact the stranger and failed every single time - even when they could see the fire burning behind the barricade and knew that there must be someone behind the wall tending it. Connie had considered it odd and excruciatingly rude behavior at first and vented her frustrations to anyone who would listen. For a long time a hard ball of disappointment formed in Lucy's stomach when she looked to the sky and knew that she would most likely never see the person on the other end of that thread of smoke again.

In the end, they made their peace easily enough with the quiet friend who lived on the other side of the hill. There are stranger things roaming the Commonwealth, after all.


	2. Chapter 2: Cursed

The radstag toed the frozen ground with the tip of its hoof, snorting as it rooted for something edible beneath the thin covering of snow. One of its heads bent down, crunching on something hard below.

 _Bones?_ she thought, old photographs of ordinary deer gnawing at the flesh of fallen animals in the dead of winter flashing across her mind.

The other head remained alert, its ears pricking at the softest sounds, its breath showing up as frost in the air. Its ear twitched in her direction as she placed her finger on the trigger, but it didn't run.

Aegis lay on her belly, the prickly underbrush tickling her skin, the old hunting rifle with its duct-taped wrapped stock and clumsy repairs, was balanced on a low rock in front of her. The barrel was pointed at the beast's great set of hearts. It was so close. It was impossible to miss at this angle.

She breathed through the scarf covering her face and tried to focus past the emptiness that was eating her from within. Most days, she was so hungry that she didn't even realize how hungry she was until she was lying on the couch, the world spinning around her. She was alive thanks to the grace of the radroaches that bred in the vault below and the kindness of the Abernathies.

A wave of giddiness washed over her at the thought of radstag stew, grilled tenderloin, a root cellar stuffed with frozen meat. She wasn't sure if she remembered what it tasted like, fresh protein. She had eaten nothing but canned for so long and even that was something of a treat. It was all gone now, in any case. The radroaches were dwindling in number and hiding deeper in the vault. Birdsong had long ceased in the woods and nothing within had stirred for weeks on her watch.  
Until now.

She steadied herself for the kick of the rifle and the explosion of its force, making sure that the earplugs were safely in place.

The radstag crunched away, its watching head oblivious to the danger hiding in plain sight. She could see some sort of rib bone poking out through the snow cover.

Holding her breath, she squeezed the trigger.

The gun emitted a loud and heinous _CLICK._

The radstag jolted into action, a bleached-white bone dropping from its mouth, its flashing tail sticking straight up as it tore off into the woods. Aegis bolted after him, throwing aside the useless rifle with a wordless snarl and wrenching her trusty pistol from her belt instead. She fired wildly as she tore after it, ripping through the snowy undergrowth, sailing past low hanging branches that threatened to slap her in the face.

 _Bang! Bang!_

The bullets sailed over the radstag's fleeing rump, quite missing the mark and being far too small to do much damage even if they had. She slowed to a walk, a feeling of nebulous dread overtaking her as she realized what she'd so carelessly done.

 _Two less bullets for radroaches._ She saw them scattering before her in her mind's eye, skittering into the darkness of the vault. Unreachable.  
The stag darted and ziggzagged through the undergrowth, the blinding whiteness of its tail growing smaller and smaller, until it vanished entirely among the bare trees.  
Aegis slowed to a halt, panting, her scarf moist with sweat. The world was spinning again and the emptiness dragged at her body. She tucked the pistol away and took as deep a breath as she could, though the cold air stung her lungs like a fleet of icy needles. She clung to a dry, dead tree for a few moments, closing her eyes as she waited for the feeling to pass.

She was not sure where she was.

None of the trees bore the marks she'd left for herself to find the way home. No familiar landmarks jumped out at her. She rolled up her sleeve and tapped at the dull screen of her pip-boy. It didn't respond. The cold made it act up worse than usual. She sighed, her breath rising up into the grey sky in a great cloud and put it away. At least her own tracks were fresh enough to follow back to the known portion of the woods. Perhaps she'd run into something edible there.

Briefly, as she trudged in the direction of home, she considered stripping the bark off the trees and making a stew out of it. No. It was all dead and dry. There were no nutrients in there.

Would it do her any good to gnaw on bones herself? An image of all the human skeletons she'd dragged into a neighbor's basement flashed across her mind. She shivered, not entirely from the cold.

 _Bloodleaf._

The word suddenly seared across her brain, in bold, glowing letters.

She thought of her collection of dried herbs hanging from the kitchen cabinets. Most of them were eaten, used for seasoning or boiled into bitter medicine. There had been a long round of stomach upsets when she'd first been figuring out what was safe and what was not. Bloodleaf was not edible, but it was much more useful for dressing wounds. She thought of the pinching mandibles of the radroaches and saw her dwindling supply hanging from its string on the cabinet knob.

 _Bloodleaf?_ she asked herself, trying to figure out where the thought had come from.

She stopped and tilted her head to listen. From somewhere nearby, the sound of it hissing through her makeshift earplugs, she could hear the sound of running water. After taking off a glove and pulling the little wads of torn-off cloth from her ears, the sound intensified. Bloodleaf was hardy. It grew on the shores of Sanctuary Hills even in the dead of winter, its deep red leaves blooming like poinsettias on Christmas. It grew slowly though. It was harder to find as winter wore on. Any source of running water was a place to check for it. It'd be something at least, to come back with a new spot at which it grew, rather than empty-handed.

She turned toward the sound, following her ears as she softly trod through the freshly fallen snow.

The woods were gloriously quiet, in a way they'd never been when life had thrived in them. Birdsong had irritated her for most of her life, loud and raucous as it'd been just outside her bedroom window in the early hours of the morning. They'd made fun of her for covering her ears during nature hikes, for gritting her teeth at the trills of creatures they'd found charming. Even so, though she'd hated their calls, something was lost with their disappearance. It was only garbage-picking seagulls and twisted ravens that survived now, in the warmer months. The gentler species were not the ones permitted life in the new ecosystem.

But for now, to her relief, there was only the soft crunch of her makeshift boots in the snow, the lonely whistle of the wind and the ripple of the water, calling from afar.  
She felt her mind slipping back once more to more pleasant things as she walked - Codsworth's flamethrower modification. His original attachment had been such a little thing, suited to lighting cigarettes or the candles her sister had busted out when she wanted a romantic dinner. It'd been one of the saving graces that had kept her warm all winter with few problems and streamlined the process of cooking food immensely. But with a few tweaks here and there, she thought, smiling as the plans buzzed through her head, it could so much more.

 _Fuel._ One of the cannisters stacked up in the old laundry room flashed into her mind. It was a rare item and it was running low. She'd cleared out a department store in Concord of the stuff and wasn't certain where she'd get more. But what if...a bottle of gin flashed into her mind. _Alcohol._ Yes...that might do the trick. There was enough of it around, meticulously preserved. She had a stash of it large enough to embarrass an alcoholic out behind the house. It was only a temporary fix, of course. It'd be difficult to keep a consistent proof and proper handy fuel was calibrated much more strongly to the task at hand.

But so was everything in this impermanent world. A bandage to stop up the gaping wound until she could find some proper medicine, however long that might take. Now, if she opened up the oxygen intake just a little and filed down the nozzle of the fuel canister…

Her heart leapt into her throat and her thought fell apart into shards at her feet when she saw the man appear, suddenly and without warning from the trees. Her blood racing through her ears, she hit the ground, ducking behind a snow-covered bush. He'd seen her. He could not have missed her. What did he want? Should…(the thought bubbled up from the cracks of her mind like tar) she kill him before he killed her?

She thought of the wince of pain she felt every time she sunk a knife into a radroach's head to kill it. Its legs wiggled helplessly for a time. She had to look away until they stopped, the shock of its death that it must feel rattling painfully around the inside of her skull.

It'd undoubtedly be worse for humans. Though by exactly how much, she couldn't say. She didn't ever wish to find out.

She lay where she was, hardly breathing, not daring to move.

Nothing moved in the clearing but a handful of snowflakes, blown on an icy wind.

That was when she realized that he had no head.

Slowly, she rose to her feet and crept out of her hiding place, pausing only to beat the snow out of her mantle.

The man was nothing but a hollow shell. She circled it once, twice, brushing the snow off its shoulders, squinting at it from every angle. On the third time around, she took a step back and her heel crunched on something buried beneath the snow. A chill ran down her spine. She knew what it was. It was too-familiar, the cracking of long-dry bones beneath her heel.

But what to do with the power armor? She'd only ever seen it in magazine articles, on the propaganda shown in movie theaters and very briefly on the bodies of the soldiers who'd rushed her into the vault so long ago. Never up close or at length. It was fascinating. All other thoughts rushed from her mind at the discovery. A great deal of the outer plating was rusted away and what remained was falling apart. But the delicate balances and counterbalances of the suit were still intact, the intricate workings of all the valves and releases made bare to the human eye, once the snow and grime were brushed away.

She wondered how she could get it home.

It was far too heavy to carry. Breaking it down would be a shame. Now, _walking_ it there, if that were possible…

 _The fusion core._ Her brain pulled up a diagram that she'd seen in a magazine two centuries ago, as she'd sat on the pull-out bed in her sister's house, greedily reading all her husband's military magazines. _Dorsal Socket: Power Source._

Brushing off some more snow, she located it, the stiff plastic knob projecting a handful of inches from the indentation that held it. There was very little chance that it had any charge left. But if she could get it out, at least she could replace it with the one she'd pulled out of the Red Rocket generator months ago.

It was stuck. She peeled off her gloves again, gripped it with the bare palms of her hands and twisted. Something clicked loudly into place. The core turned around in its socket and all of a sudden the entire back of the armor opened up like a blooming flower. She stumbled backwards and landed heavily on her butt in surprise. The armor was _humming._ She could hear it even clearer when she got up and stuck her head inside. It was a steady, soothing music, welcoming and warming to her cold body.  
Miraculously, some of the padding inside had somehow been preserved. It looked to be in working order. Home couldn't be that far. If she kept at it, she could probably be there in time enough to prevent Codsworth worrying.

And then - her fingers twitched with joy at the thought of a project she could pour herself into, a thing she could focus on while her body ate itself from the inside. She flapped one arm quickly at her side to dissipate the uncontainable joy pulsing inside of her and climbed inside.

Gingerly, she fitted her feet into the snug sockets, her body to the grooves and dips that seemed nearly custom-built to hug it, her fingers, one by one into the bulky, oversized gauntlets. With a slight whirring, the armor locked behind her and clicked shut. She tried taking a step. There was something pointy digging into her leg from inside and the collar was tighter than she'd been hoping. Her footfalls were heavy, crushing the snow beneath them and leaving ribbed indentations behind. She felt powerful, unstoppable, if a bit slower than she would have been if she'd been walking entirely on her own power. The balance wasn't quite what it could be and the little discomforts were beginning to grate on her but if this was what it was like then maybe…

Something beeped loudly from behind her. The fusion core? Its charge was fading. Of course. That was fine. It wasn't likely to move if she left it and came back with the fresh one.  
 _Eject button?_ She scanned the magazine article in her memory, the word _T-45_ sticking especially in her mind. The most common model. The basic design for everything that followed. It had to be the same and the eject button was…

She fit her finger into a small notch under the edge of the breastplate, just big enough for one gauntleted finger and pressed. It clicked under her touch.

Nothing happened.

She tried a different angle. She tried pressing harder. Panic was rising in her throat, the inescapable pinching at the back of her neck steadily driving her closer to meltdown.

The fusion core died with a sad, drawn-out _booooop._

It was as though all the energy had been drained from her body in one fell swoop. The weight of the suit was crushing, heavier than any load of scrap she'd ever carried on her back, weighing on her shoulders, dragging her arms to her side, locking her legs into the slowest of crawls. She imagined night falling as she struggled home under the cold moon, the nocturnal creatures creeping out under shadow of darkness, they jaws dripping with saliva at the sight of a slow-moving meal.

All of a sudden, she couldn't breathe. The armor was squeezing her chest, crushing her lungs. The sound of the nearby stream, the feel of the wind - they were all an assault on her senses. She wanted to scream, to thrash, to kick and tear at the untouched, blindingly white snow until it was dull and muddy. She could feel her pistol pressing up against her body inside the suit. Even if she could get to it, it was not likely that her bulky hands could fit around it.

Instead, she took as deep a breath as she could manage. The first was not a very big one and was barely more than a half-choked gasp. But the second was better. With the third, her heart was still racing, but her mind was clearer than it had been. _Every machine has a backup system,_ she struggled to think through the all-consuming noise of her mind. _Where is this one's?_

The diagram hovered, blurry, quaking, out of focus in her mind's eye. _BUTTON BUTTON BUTTON,_ it said, zooming in on the arrow pointing to the underside of the chest plate. _I know,_ she said, her voice tiny and scared in the confines of her head. _Something else._

The view shifted, scanning each minute detail of her memory, some of the outlines foggy, the words blurred. Until she came to an arrow pointing under the left armpit. It was not something she had paid much mind to when she had read it. There were a million more interesting things in that magazine, a thousand dreams that had never come to pass. The words were smudged and she could not be certain of what they were directing her to. Focusing on them, she dredged one word up from the morass of memory.

 _EMERGENCY._

There. It would not be an easy spot to reach and she was not entirely sure of what she would be feeling for. If only she hadn't gotten so excited, if only she'd spent more time with her brother in law, if only the core had a trickle of power left in it, if only she wasn't so hungry all the time, if only it wasn't so cold, if only it wasn't such a miserable world, if, if, if, if, if…

Grimacing with effort, she hefted her right arm and lifted her left to give the other easier access. It was like lifting a limb encased in lead. Her fingers felt hopelessly clumsy, using all their strength to grapple at air and rusted metal.

They caught on something. Some sort of handle? Her fingers curled around it, locking into place. She took another deep breath, calming her heart and gathering her strength. She had a sudden vision of the handle breaking off in her hand as she pulled and threw the thought violently from her mind as quickly as it had come.

Grimacing with effort, she pulled.

The armor opened and she tumbled out, all wobbly legs and flailing arms, inches away from cracking her head on a rock as she fell. But no such disaster occurred and nothing stirred in the silence of the wood. She pulled her gun out of her belt and clicked the safety on and off a couple of times, growing calmer with every click, her anxiety vanishing as quickly as her puffs of warm breath evaporated into nothing in the chilly air.

She laid there for a minute longer, staring up at the grey sky and the steady march of darker snow clouds beginning to overtake it. The sound of the stream babbled and trickled on the edge of her consciousness, calling her to its edge with pleasant thoughts. Breathing out one last time, she tucked the gun away and sat up. Powdery snow clung to the back of her radstag hide clothes like a downy mantle.

A storm was coming and all the hungry beasts that came with it. At home there was firewood and safety and one more radroach to eat. Maybe Codsworth would tell the same story over dinner again. She'd get to work on his flamethrower tonight. She imagined the reaction that pack of hungry mongrels would have to that and smiled, weakly but surely.

By the time she reached home, she realized that she'd entirely forgotten about the bloodleaf.


	3. Chapter 3: Sunshine

She craved color like a raider craves jet.

She carried around a small crowbar useful for popping the license plates off of cars. Most of them were of course from Massachusetts, though there were a good amount hailing from New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut to be found. The lone specimen from Arizona - with its faded desert sunset - was the pride of her collection.

Street signs still bearing any trace of paint were not immune to her lust either. She once spent an entire afternoon fighting with the rusted screws anchoring a well-preserved stop sign to its post.

She scraped every single powder blue "Employees Must Wash Hands" sign off the wall of every restroom she visited. She had a box of icons she'd collected from the said restrooms and sometimes liked to line them up to compare differences.

Posters and prints were quite a bit harder to come by. There were scraps of them pasted to walls everywhere, sure, but unless they'd been kept in optimum conditions, far away from sunlight and moisture and heat, the likelihood that they'd have much color left at all was not very high. Stumbling upon a crate full of old monster movie posters in a drive-in janitor's closet had been one of the highlights of her post-apocalyptic life.

The walls of her bedroom (or rather, the bedroom that had once been shared by her sister and brother in law) were covered in a dizzying mishmash of these things. A glaring yellow yield sign, a peeling still life of a bowl of fruit (what on earth did bananas taste like? She couldn't remember), a snarling Dracula, a goggle-eyed Creature From the Black Lagoon, a hard-won Route 128 sign. It was how she marked a space as belonging to her. Stepping into that room filled her with a sense of all-encompassing inner peace whenever she returned home, particularly after an especially dangerous trip.

She'd lay on her mound of blankets and furs, rubbing her face into the warm body of the dog who'd made its home in her presence, cocooned by the soft glow of the lantern as it played over the brilliance of the walls. In there, every trouble from the outside world melted away - her hunger, her loneliness, her fear.

There were times when she couldn't bring herself to get out of bed - when the outside was too much and it took every ounce of effort to set a toe on her front step. But then her stomach would start growling or the dog would whine at the door or Codsworth would come blustering in with his arms knocking everything to the floor as he went on about what a fine day it was today and then...

She'd alternately grit her teeth, smile or shake her head, and pull herself out into the wide world, with all the strange new perils it entailed.

She had made it through her first winter since the War in that room, surrounded by relics and kept sane by the warm glow of What Was. She was never keen on leaving it behind for too long, despite the gradual widening of her scavenging routes. But times were changing and pickings were growing slim. The shelves of the Concord Grocery were bare and those of her pantry, soon to follow. She could not depend wholeheartedly on the scraps of a small farm family for sustenance this winter. Almost all her thoughts as of late were focused on building up a store of food strong enough to last her through those brutal, colder months.

And so, come summer, she packed her bags, waved goodbye to Codsworth and set foot on a journey from which she knew she would not be returning for some time.

The dog trotted at her heels, his tail held high, his tongue lolling out of his mouth as he provided what small comfort he could on the road.

*.*.*

She'd thought it was a summer camp at first.

It was a ring of cabins circling a mess hall, after all, with the communal toilet on the fringe of the property. A purposefully primitive setup back in the era of fusion-powered cars and automated shopping malls, but nowadays, prime move-in ready housing.

Her opinion on the place's nature changed when she circled the mess hall and found herself face to face with a rusting sign nailed to the building.

 _Free the Robots_

The message was flanked by a couple of crude drawings of what appeared to be a Mr. Handy and a Protectron. She had to squint in the bright sunlight and imagine the missing parts to piece it together.

Something else, then.

It didn't matter.

The view was spectacular. She could see forever from up on the hillside - a bird's eye view of the factory and the town below, its buildings like dollhouses from so high above. With riches galore, she was certain, an image of a fully-stocked grocery store suddenly popping into her mind. It would take time to sort through it all, to separate the good pickings from the bad and figure out what it was that she was going to haul home for the winter.

She'd need a base of operations from which to do that. Not too close to the town center, lest there be raiders (towns attracted them like nobody's business), but near enough to get there and back through means of a brisk hike. Her footsteps light, her senses alert, she cast an eye about the place, envisioning what it might be like to live here for the summer. It wasn't _home_ and that fact scared her deep down, in a way she hadn't felt in a long time, but perhaps once she'd made it a bit more livable -  
Her blood froze in her veins and her heart skipped a beat when a heavily damaged Mr. Handy came whirring around the corner. Its outer shell was torn away to reveal the cruel edges of its motorized face, the cute facade of his model stripped away. It was barreling right towards her, its rusted arms swimming through the air. Her fingers were fumbling to get her gun out of its holster. It was about to -

"Groovy!" it burbled, its voice warped and tinny as it abruptly changed direction and went buzzing back to where it came from. It took her about thirty seconds to process what had happened and even longer to decide on what the thing had actually _said_.

And then she stood there - frozen for a moment, gradually remembering how to breathe again - as she watched it go. Its path was strangely erratic, all zigzags and loops, no internal sense about it at all. Curious. Interesting. Her fingers twitched to pop open its chassis.

But that was not something that needed solving right this minute.

She drew her pistol, made sure it was loaded and went about the slow, arduous task of securing the perimeter. This was the worst part of any expedition. The sound of the gun hurt her ears and she felt a twinge of pain at the death of anything she shot, no matter how horrible. But she'd since learned that it was much better to face these things head on rather than get surprises later.

She chose a cabin to start at and opened the door.

A radroach skittered across the floor. She held her breath and shot it. It fell with a resigned squeak, its legs twitching for a full minute after it had died. The second cabin was more of the same and the third was empty. But the fourth…

A dogpile of sleeping ghouls nested inside, their chests rising and falling to the time of their wheezing breaths.

She shut the door quietly, stepped back and not for the first time, wished that Codsworth and his flamethrower were here.

A single ghoul she could handle at once, provided that she could force herself to forget for a moment how human they looked. But the three she'd counted? No.

That was fine, though. Luck was on her side, much more so than usual. She'd caught them at their least active, sleeping so deeply that the sounds of her gunfire hadn't roused them. She just had to think around it.

There was a bear trap that she'd carried all the way from Sanctuary, a nasty old thing that she'd found in the woods. It had caught a radstag fawn exactly once in its lifespan (the meat had been welcome, though she'd felt awful about killing a juvenile). If her luck held, she thought, an image of teeth closing around a ghoul's ankle springing to mind, that was one ghoul down.

At that moment the dog came bounding up the hill, a bone in his mouth, his tail wagging as he darted about playfully. He didn't technically belong to her - the creature was half-wild and went his own way more often than not. But meals and wound treatment had a way of bringing him back to her eventually. He dropped the bone when he passed by the ghoul-filled cabin and began growling softly, the fur standing up on the ridge of his back.

A second ghoul down. One remaining. The odds were about as good as they were going to get.

Swallowing her fear, she opened the door, fired a shot at the sleeping pile inside and took off at a dead run.

She heard the snap of the trap behind her and the inhuman wail of a creature in pain. The dog snarled and flesh tore. Shambling footsteps were racing behind her. She swung around to take her shot and -

The ghoul ( _a woman - it'd been a woman. There was a pearl necklace embedded in her-_ ) was on her, shoving her the ground. Aegis shrieked, firing wildly, kicking and flailing and crying until -

It ( _she?_ ) was dead.

She kicked the body off of her and lay there for a moment, catching her breath, calming the wailing in her head, the jangling in her nerves.

The dog stood over his kill proudly, wagging his tail.

The ghoul in the bear trap was in the midst of an attempt to gnaw its own leg off.

It'd been some sort of businessman ( _stop looking_ ). A faded silk tie hung from its neck ( _stop_ ) and -

She raised her gun and fired, not pausing to think.

It fell with a groan like a deflating balloon, blood as red as her own leaking from the hole in its forehead.

She rolled the bodies down the hill and watched them tumble to the bottom, turning away before they smacked on the rocks below. Her clothes stunk with the scent of them and her palms were stained with rust.

The pump ran brown at first, but cleared as she kept trying, making frustrated sounds at it in her throat.

She dumped a freezing bucket of water over herself and scrubbed until she was raw.

*.*.*

The radroaches were thrown into the pot for supper. They were done when she could hear steam hissing through their shells. The first she cracked open for the dog and he dug in happily, inhaling the bug's guts like they were the last thing he'd ever eat.

Disdainfully, she eyed her own portion, the memory of eating nothing but radroaches for months on end putting a sour taste in her mouth. If she mashed up the innards with a fork and swirled them around a bit inside the shell, she could almost pretend that it was some sort of chunky cream soup.

 _Cream of Potato._ she thought defiantly, seeing it bubbling on the stove, smelling the fragrant steam it put off. _Cheese. Sour cream…_

Too bad she was out of chives.

*.*.*

The cabins were more solidly built than she'd first assumed.

The walls didn't shudder at a good kick, the roofs were more or less waterproof and most of them, aside from a few exceptions, had all four walls. Feeling luxurious, she chose the nicest one for herself, the old nurse's station. There was still a box of medical supplies to be found within, a few scraps of decent furniture and a musty wheelchair that seemed to her one of the most useful things she'd ever found.

The mattress on the bed stank of mildew and damp. That was the first thing to go, down the hill with the rest of the poisonous trash that infested the place. With the help of a sledgehammer, she dismantled the bed frame and tossed the rusty hunks out the front door. In another cabin she found a broom and hummed to herself as she swept centuries of dirt and dust out of what was shaping up to be a fine living space after all.

Unfortunately, there was still the matter of the collapsed tree on the front porch. It had smashed through a section of the railing, barely missing the front door. The wood was warped below it, creating an odd dip where there most certainly had not been one before.

After the inside of the cabin was as set as it was going to be, she stood there looking at it for while, struggling to come up with an answer to the problem.

"Whoa, maaaan." the robot drawled, its voice suddenly scrambling and dropping an octave lower as it whirred dizzily by.

*.*.*

There was not a single iota of the robot's internal mechanics that made sense. The voicebox was full of what appeared to be rotting leaves. It took her much longer than it should have to figure out how the fuselage was connected and the command module was just about rusted through. Not to mention the layers of filth that had built up inside, seeing as it had no plating to protect it. How the thing had survived this long, exposed to the wind and weather and whatever it was that had violently torn off one of its arms was far beyond her.

The first step was cleaning it out as best she could, though there was dirt in places that couldn't be reached without totally dissembling the bot. The second involved a bit of copper wire from home and just enough solder to get by. She spent most of the afternoon diligently rewiring a series of workarounds and hoping for the best.

Nervously playing with the pliers in her free hand, she replaced the back panel and firmly pressed the reset button.

The robot drowsily came to life, its thrusters weak at first but suddenly firing on all cylinders with a burst of flame and a rush of noise.

"What's hep, daddy-o?" it said cheerily, its voice sounding of creaking doors and rusty drains.

Smiling under her mask, Aegis turned away and picked up the length of chain she'd found in what she'd deemed the maintenance building. She carefully fastened it around what remained of the robot's core body, giving it tug to be sure it was secure.

"Hey...hey!" It squeaked, squirming under her touch, "What's your bag, lady?"

Paying it no mind, she set about to hooking the other end of the chain around the offending tree, hopping over to the other side and taking her place, her knees bent, her shoulders squared. The robot watched her quizzically, its cracked eyes following her every movement.

"Grhk." she said quietly, making a pulling motion with her hand and then pointing to the bot.

It stared at her for a moment, something grinding audibly inside it.

And then it _clicked_ , bobbing enthusiastically in response.

At her signal, the robot heaved with all its might, a great flame shooting out of its struggling thruster as pulled against the chain that held it, just barely shifting the tree. Aegis grunted, gritting her teeth as she pushed, her feet digging into dusty soil. There was the loud sound of cracking as part of the porch gave way and the tree came tumbling down. The foundations of the house groaned and Aegis backed away quickly, fearing that all her work had been for nought after all.

But the building settled and stood as firmly as it had, save for the new hole in the porch railing. The robot's thruster sputtered for a moment and it dipped low to the ground. A wad of guilt for fixing the thing only to have it die on her now bubbled up in her gut, when it suddenly got a fresh burst of energy and wriggled excitedly in the air.  
"Gnarly, dude!" it chirped, buzzing in deliriously happy circles as it hopelessly entangled itself in the chain.

Laughing under her breath, she freed it, handed it a stick and pointed to all the rest of the dry kindling on the ground.

"Oh, climb it, Tarzan." it grumbled, flying off to finish its task.

*.*.*

The sky was clearer than she had ever seen it in the before-time. It was just as clear in Sanctuary, of course (nothing could ever top her rooftop stargazing perch). But up on the hill, with nothing to interrupt the skyline but the distant imprint of faraway buildings, it seemed so much _bigger_ than ever before. She laid on a soft radstag hide beside the roaring fire, her pistol in her lap as she clicked the safety on and off with satisfaction and gazed at the diamonds glittering in the heavens.

What had street lights been like? Annoying, she remembered. Blinding, when they're outside your bedroom window. There had been one that made an awful buzzing sound that grated on her eardrums every time she was obliged to wait beneath it for the bus.

And they'd canceled out the stars.

All of a sudden there was a loud and terrible sound like a running lawnmower being thrown into a woodchipper or a jet plane tearing itself to pieces in the atmosphere or -  
Frantically, she slapped both hands over her ears and sat up, squeezing her eyes shut until it was done.

The robot buzzed closer, offering an open can from the arm fitted with a can opener attachment.

"Your gut waddin', m'am." it chirped, slopping about half the beans out of the can.

Aegis put her hand to her head and laughed, one arm spazzing happily at her side before she accepted the can.

*.*.*

Somehow, she had managed to lift an entire can of yellow paint from a nearby camp of raiders. It was a foolish thing to risk life and limb for, she knew, next to food, ammunition, water or honestly, anything else. It was heavy and messy and clanked against her legs as she made her getaway. It was also entirely possible that there was nothing but a congealed mass or something unmentionable inside the ancient can. But even so…

The robot peering over her shoulder, she gingerly pried off the lid with a screwdriver. There was a slick layer of oil on top, but once she'd given it a stir...it was beautiful.  
 _Van Gogh,_ the thought came back to her. Painted sunflowers, light, warmth, color so bright it was fit to eat…

She looked around the cabin, trying to deduce where it would be best displayed. Using it outdoors was out, though the thought of walking through a yellow door everyday was an excellent one. It was too striking. Too worthy of unwanted attention.

She stood up and walked to the far wall, running her hand over the dark wood. Two tiny windows provided their minimal light from outdoors. It barely reached to the back. But if the wall were a lighter color...

Experimentally, the childish exhuberance of _making a mess_ virating through her skull, she dipped a brush in and made one streak along the wall. It was the color of goldenrod and it filled her soul with joy.

"Groovy, man!" the robot chirped, knocking over a collection of scavenged screws in its excitement.

*.*.*

She felt the vibrations of their feet on the ground long before the fight started. The dog felt it too. His fur bristled under her touch and he pulled himself out of her grasp. He pawed at the door, whining pathetically. Aegis buried her face in the furs of her bed, a shiver running down her spine at their snarls, their growls, their ravenous hunger. Do monsters retreat back under the bed if you lay as still as a corpse?

There were claws clicking on the wood of the porch, noses snuffling under the door.

The dog growled, menacingly, the hair standing up on the ridge of his back.

 _The door is barred thedoor isbarred thedoor is barredthe doorisbarredthe -_

There was the sound of grating metal, a series of pained yelps, a shriek of something breaking under stress and then...silence.

She laid in bed for another twenty minutes, curled in the tiniest possible ball, struggling to take long, slow breaths, frantically clicking the safety on and off. When nothing more but silence came from the outside the door, she pulled herself to her feet and opened it.

*.*.*

There was very little left worth salvaging of the robot. Its fusion core was shot and there was no way to fix the screw that had once held its leg in place without finding an exact replacement.

She threw the husk on the scrap pile and spent the morning dressing what remained of the mongrels' meat. The best bits of it she grilled for lunch, noting with satisfaction the considerable size her kindling pile had grown to since she had given the robot its task. The rest of the meat she laid out to dry in the noonday sun. It'd make good travel food, when she was ready to set out again.

She felt the robot's eyes on her back all the while, a slight prickling at the back of her head, a gaze she could not escape. It was stupid. It was dead. It didn't matter anymore.  
She spent the afternoon digging a grave in the back of the house.

When the dirt was settled over the broken body, she leaned on the shovel and smiled as she thought of a can of beans and a broken robot, over eager to please.

*.*.*

The paint was just about dry. She'd left the door open for hours, but it still stank inside. Perhaps it'd be better to choose another cabin, just for this night, until things aired out.  
She didn't have enough paint to finish the job - it covered just about two walls of the cabin, with a few erratic brush swipes on a third. She liked it though, the act of making a thing that was purposefully imperfect and leaving it that way. It was rebellious. It was beautiful.

She stepped inside, advancing forward until all her vision was consumed by goldenrod walls. There were a few license plates that she'd managed to find recently in her hands. A single Texas plate and quite a few more Massachusetts ones, all of them brighter than the grey world they came from.

She held them up experimentally, testing their angles, deciding on where they'd look best. There'd be more where that came from. Lexington was rife with street signs and advertisements that demanded they be pulled off the walls.

The paint had stopped smelling so bad by the time night fell. She set her lantern in the corner of the room, its soft glow giving the color a warmth that it had not had before. She settled down in her furs, wrapping them around her, feeling their comforting texture, their weight, an uncontainable smile stretching across her face.

She watched the shadows play on the brilliant wall until her eyelids grew heavy and her weariness gave way to rest.


End file.
